How to do a great job
Actionable advice for product engineers
Your main priority as a product engineer is to release functionality that is being used by product customers on a live environment.
Releases are most often hard and stressful. Follow these set of practices to make releases happen:
- Commit changes daily
- Commit is the result of a daily work. If you worked that day, aim to have at least one commit
- Break complex features into chunks that you can gradually commit daily
- Send detailed updates to clients daily
- Update = your commits + comments and changes on tasks + links to docs you created
- Send updates in shared team channels, not in private
- Bad updates: “fixed bugs”, “investigating issue”
- Good update includes specific changes and things you've created; attach screenshots or videos; link to the doc with research; mention work in progress
- Highlight blockers if something prevents you from doing productive work; but first try to resolve blockers yourself
- Move faster than the plan
- If due date is Friday, aim to get ready on Wednesday
- The last 20% of work takes 80% of effort; it gets really tough as you get closer to release, so finish early
- Don't plan release on Fridays; Thursdays are great for that
- Release weekly: the more often you release to production, the better
- Release is more than code shipped. Record a demo or write a changelog entry carefully explaining what was shipped exactly to your clients — don't think it's obvious
- Doing “okay work” is not enough
- If you’re not sure if clients are actually excited about your work, most likely they are not, even if it seems fine; a client should say “f!#! yeah” when they see your work
- You should feel proud of what you shipped, yet slightly ashamed, because there are always things to improve
| Update | Comment | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Commit | A chunk of done work | Daily |
| Client Update | Specific tasks, work done and in progress; Include screenshots, videos, links to docs | Daily |
| Release | Deployed feature, ready to used by product customers | Weekly |
| Demo | Online walkthrough, Recorded video or a Doc/Page with screenshots | Weekly |
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